This blog examines my search for balance in life, focused through the lens of my passion for food.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Not Just Another Foodie Blog

Foodie blogs abound all over the Internet. There are blogs about cooking, about restaurants, about gross packaged scary foods. If you can eat it, someone's written about it. So, why do another one? Why am I so special?

I'm a fat girl. I've been a fat girl since puberty. I've been an overeater since I can remember. There doesn't seem to have been a time in my life in which I haven't fought with my weight and my size and my eating.

Until now.

After a 15-month stint on a very strict, all-meat regimen, which, when I am honest with myself, I was following in a desperate hope to become magically lean, I was still just as fat when I started. In that year and a quarter of eschewing all carbohydrate consumption, my net loss of body fat was a big fat zero. I lost a bit at first, and then it all came back when I tried to speed things up by eating only one meal a day. Craziness.

Zero carb had promised me the miracle of absolution from calorie math. It did not deliver on this promise.

I realized one very simple fact that I was refusing to see: if you eat too much, it has to go somewhere. In my case, that somewhere was my gut, thighs, and ass. If you want those bulky appendages to become more streamlined, you have to reduce the sheer volume of what you stuff down your gullet.

Despite the fact that I did have tons of fun eating assloads of meat at a sitting, I stared with dismay at the simple reality of life. I was not one of the lucky ones who can be absolved from calorie math simply by restricting intake to only one kind of substance.

And, since keeping tabs on the volume of food I was snarfing was now a requirement, choosing my food from only 0.0005% of edible matter completely ceased to make any sense whatsoever. If I have to manage the amounts I eat anyway, I might as well eat what I like.

But this is not another diet blog. Quite the opposite. After the year-plus on zero carb, the last thing I want to do is diet.

Neither do I want to abuse myself with gratuitous excess.

And here is where I am at: seeking to find internal balance while acknowledging and embracing my consuming passion for food (or is that my passion for consuming food?). In fact, I am seeking this internal balance BY MEANS of my enjoyment in food, cooking, and eating.

In her most recent book, "Women, Food, and God," Geneen Roth says that basically everything about how you relate to the Universe can be elucidated from the way you relate to the food on your plate. It seems a little simplistic at first glance, but, when you examine the statement, she hits the nail right on the head. Eating is the most basic way in which we avail ourselves of the resources from the Universe. When this relationship is out of balance, we find ourselves out of balance, too.

In this blog, I will be writing primarily about food and eating, but this, of course, relates to everything else I do in life. Recipes, restaurants, reflections, ponderings, and a bit of this and that thrown in.

3 comments:

Insofar as food habits, diets, the struggles to find something that works are concerned, I think our lives have paralleled one another. I happily anticipate looking in on your blog from time to time, not because I cook (which I don't-on that, I am a completely helpless dork), but because of the punchy style of your writing.

The muted pastels of the blog page itself feel somewhat girly, though. Any chance of adding some tiger stripes or something?

You totally rawk. I have never met anyone with the dedication and knowledge to and of a WOE. I trust your judgment -- if meatatarian wasn't it -- then it wasn't. I can't believe there are people who would begrudge you something that DOES work. Good luck, Carolina! It seems you are finally on the right track...moderation in ALL things!